Gáspár Miklós Tamás: 

Telling the truth about class

One of the central questions of social theory has been the relationship between
class and knowledge, and this has also been a crucial question in the history of
socialism. Differences between people – acting and knowing subjects – may
influence our view of the possibility of valid cognition. If there are
irreconcilable discrepancies between people’s positions, going perhaps as far as
incommensurability, then unified and rational knowledge resulting from a
reasoned dialogue among persons is patently impossible. The Humean notion of
‘passions’, the Nietzschean notions of ‘resentment’ and ‘genealogy’, allude to
the possible influence of such an incommensurability upon our ability to
discover truth.

Class may be regarded as a problem either in epistemology or in the

philosophy of history, but I think that this separation is unwarranted, since if we
separate epistemology and philosophy of history (which is parallel to other such
separations characteristic of bourgeois society itself) we cannot possibly avoid
the rigidly-posed conundrum known as relativism. In speaking about class (and
truth, and class and truth) we are the heirs of two socialist intellectual traditions,
profoundly at variance with one another, although often intertwined politically
and emotionally. I hope to show that, up to a point, such fusion and confusion is
inevitable.

All versions of socialist endeavour can and should be classified into two
principal kinds, one inaugurated by Rousseau, the other by Marx. The two have
opposite visions of the social subject in need of liberation, and these visions
have determined everything from rarefied epistemological positions concerning
language and consciousness to social and political attitudes concerning wealth,
culture, equality, sexuality and much else. It must be said at the outset that
many, perhaps most socialists who have sincerely believed they were Marxists,
have in fact been Rousseauists. Freud has eloquently described resistances to
psychoanalysis; intuitive resistance to Marxism is no less widespread, even
among socialists. It is emotionally and intellectually difficult to be a Marxist
since it goes against the grain of moral indignation which is, of course, the main
reason people become socialists.

One of the greatest historians of the Left, E.P. Thompson, has synthesized
what can be best said of class in the tradition of Rousseauian socialism which
believes itself to be Marxian.1 The Making of the English Working Class is
universally – and rightly – recognized to be a masterpiece. Its beauty, moral
force and conceptual elegance originate in a few strikingly unusual articles of
faith: (1) that the working class is a worthy cultural competitor of the ruling
class; (2) that the Lebenswelt of the working class is socially and morally
superior to that of its exploiters; (3) that regardless of the outcome of the class
struggle, the autonomy and separateness of the working class is an intrinsic
social value; (4) that the class itself is constituted by the autopoiesis of its
rebellious political culture, including its re-interpretation of various traditions, as
well as by technology, wage labour, commodity production and the rest.
Whereas Karl Marx and Marxism aim at the abolition of the proletariat,
Thompson aims at the apotheosis and triumphant survival of the proletariat.

Thompson’s Rousseauian brand of Marxism triggered a sustained critique by

Perry Anderson, one that is now half-forgotten but still extremely important.
Although his terms are quite different from mine, Anderson sought to show that
Thompson’s conviction that he was a Marxist was erroneous.2 Thompson had
participated in a number of movements and intellectual adventures inspired by
Marxism, and his fidelity to radical socialism – under twentieth-century
circumstances – meant loyalty to Marxism’s revolutionary legacy. But
Thompson had to ignore the Faustian-demonic encomium of capitalism inherent
in Marx, and so he had to oppose ‘critical theory’, and then theory tout
court.3 Anderson later described this decomposition of ‘Western Marxism’ –
away from class to ‘the people’ – in conceptual terms,4 a diagnosis that has been
proved right by events since.

ROUSSEAU VERSUS MARX

The main difference between Rousseau and Marx is that Rousseau seeks to
replace (stratified, hierarchical, dominated) society with the people (a purely
egalitarian and culturally self-sustaining, closed community), while Marx does
not want to ‘replace’ society by annihilating ‘rule’ and the ruling class as such,
but believes that capitalism (one specific kind of society) might end in a way in
which one of its fundamental classes, the proletariat, would abolish itself and
thereby abolish capitalism itself. It is implied (it is sous-entendu) that the moral
motive for such a self-abolition is the intolerable, abject condition of the
proletariat. Far from its excellence – extolled by the Rousseauians – it is, on the
contrary, its wretchedness, its total alienation, that makes it see that it has
‘nothing to lose but its chains’, and that it has ‘a world to win’. In the Marxist
view it is not the people’s excellence, superiority or merit that makes socialism –
the movement to supersede, to transcend capitalism – worthwhile but, on the
contrary, its being robbed of its very humanity. Moreover, there is no ‘people’,
there are only classes. Like the bourgeoisie itself, the working class is the result
of the destruction of a previous social order. Marx does not believe in the self-
creation or the self-invention of the working class, parallel to or alongside
capitalism, through the edification of an independent set of social values, habits
and techniques of resistance.

Thus there is an angelic view of the exploited (that of Rousseau, Karl Polányi,

E.P. Thompson) and there is a demonic, Marxian view. For Marx, the road to
the end of capitalism (and beyond) leads through the completion of capitalism, a
system of economic and intellectual growth, imagination, waste, anarchy,
destruction, destitution. It is an apocalypse in the original Greek sense of the
word, a ‘falling away of the veils’ which reveals all the social mechanisms in
their stark nakedness; capitalism helps us to know because it is unable to sustain
illusions, especially naturalistic and religious illusions. It liberated subjects from
their traditional rootedness (which was presented to them by the ancient
regime as ‘natural’) to hurl them onto the labour market where their productive-
creative essence reveals itself to be disposable, replaceable, dependent on
demand – in other words, wholly alien to self-perception or ‘inner worth’. In
capitalism, what human beings are, is contingent or stochastic; there is no way
in which they are as such, in themselves. Their identity is limited by the
permanent re-evaluation of the market and by the transient historicity of
everything, determined by – among other contingent factors – random
developments in science and technology. What makes the whole thing demonic
indeed is that in contradistinction to the external character, the
incomprehensibility, of ‘fate’, ‘the stars’, participants in the capitalist economy
are not born to that condition, they are placed in their respective positions by a
series of choices and compulsions that are obviously man-made. To be born
noble and ignoble is nobody’s fault, has no moral dimensions; but alienation
appears self-inflicted.

Marx is the poet of that Faustian demonism: only capitalism reveals the social,
and the final unmasking; the final apocalypse, the final revelation can be reached
by wading through the murk of estrangement which, seen historically, is unique
in its energy, in its diabolical force.5 Marx does not ‘oppose’ capitalism
ideologically; but Rousseau does. For Marx, it is history; for Rousseau, it is evil.

It was Karl Polányi who best described the foundations of Rousseauian

socialism, of which he himself was an archetypal representative.6 According to
Polányi, the great discovery of Rousseau was the discovery of ‘the people’. This
is not as trivial as it may seem. The common assumption of all philosophy – in
contradiction to Christianity – is that raw, untutored humanity is worthless.
Ancient Greek philosophy, to which all subsequent lovers of wisdom were
supposed to have supplied nought but footnotes, held that virtue was knowledge.
But knowledge (science, philosophy, even litterae humaniores) is a social
institution, possible only in certain situations of high complexity, sometimes
called ‘civilization’, which would allow the growth and betterment of that
knowledge. Thus, augmenting science presupposes a necessary or at least
plausible perfectibility of civilization and the general salutary character of social
institutions useful or indispensable for the advance of cognition.
 Rousseau reversed the philosophical trend of more than two millennia when
he said that arts, letters, sciences, ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ did not contribute
to the moral progress of humankind – on the contrary. The basic intuitions of
persons living in circumstances which would not be conducive to the advance of
knowledge and the ever-growing refinement of arts, mores and manners were,
he thought, superior to whatever complex, unequal and sophisticated societies
could boast of. Superior in what sense?

These intuitions were deemed to be superior because the development of

civilization required an ever-growing separation between humans – high culture,
according to Nietzsche, presupposes slavery that can sustain a leisured
aristocracy dedicated to war and play and beauty – to the extent that all ‘virtues’
are necessarily confined to a few. Even in societies where essential
communication still takes place among people personally acquainted with each
other (affection and sympathy are possible only among such persons) the main
‘civilizational’ transactions are dispatched by abstract mediation such as script.
In order to maintain a modicum of fairness and uniformity in society, it is
necessary to codify law and religion. People will believe and revere the same
prescriptions (‘values’) by reading or being read to (by officials), instead of
coming to agree as a result of shared experience and feeling. Script and code
(uniform law, scriptural religion, formal education, high art) will change from
tools of mediation in society, aiding contact and co-operation, into a social goal,
a motivational source of future action – in other words: authority. But this is an
authority based on the familiar transformation of a tool into an end or a goal. It
is a ‘fetish’.

Rousseau thought that we would have remained both more virtuous and much
happier were we bereft or at least rid of mediation. He knew it was too late, and
his recipes for a solution are famously desperate; they take essentially the shape
of a purge, ‘cleansing’, épuration. All Rousseauian socialist solutions (for this
reason extremely popular in peasant societies, that is, in societies with a still
strong cultural recollection of peasant experience and ideals) aim at
simplification. Simplification towards a more natural (or, with luck, a
completely natural) way of life. It is, after all, Karl Polányi’s famous thesis that
market societies are not natural, that they are the exception rather than the rule
in history.7 On the one hand, he resists the idea that capitalism is a natural order,
whose emergence was only prevented in the past by scientific and technological
backwardness and blind superstition; and he resists the idea that competitiveness
and acquisitiveness are ‘instincts’ characteristic of all societies, only repressed
in the past by chivalric and religious ‘false consciousness’ (and here he is of one
mind with Marxists in ‘historicizing’ competition and the market.) On the other
hand, Polányi regards non-market societies as ‘natural’ for being in the historical
majority. He believed that we should orient our social action towards a re-
establishment of what modern capitalism has falsified.

The other great Rousseauian socialist Marcel Mauss has shown that most acts
of exchange in the history of humankind were motivated not by a desire for
gain, but for ostentatious display and the satisfaction of pride.8 Yet another
Rousseauian socialist, Georges Bataille, one of the few truly prophetic geniuses,
has generalized Mauss’s point in drawing attention to society’s need for
unproductive losses, waste and destruction, which contradicts any notion of
utility.9 Sacrifice, he reminds us, etymologically means ‘the production of the
sacred’. The sacred is the result of unnecessary bloodshed. Non-genital and non-
reproductive sexuality has long been considered ‘a waste’. All these elements
have been classified under the rubric of ‘the irrational’, since only equitable
exchange conforms to the official idea of rationality which cannot, ever, account
for a surplus which appears as ‘savage’ or ‘illusory’. But then, bourgeois
society, in the guise of ‘representative government’, has always equated ‘the
people’ with the ‘irrational’. The apposite clichés (savage ‘crowds’, ‘masses’)
have been inherited from the late Roman republic.

Rousseau’s innovation was the unheard-of provocation of declaring the people

– the servants of passion – morally and culturally superior to reasoned and
cultured discourse and its Träger, the civilized elite of Court and University, and
even the counter-elite of belles-lettres, experimental science, and the
Enlightenment pamphleteering and journalistic culture to which Rousseau
himself, of course, belonged. Against that discourse, again in terms of Roman
republican controversies, Rousseau championed the martial, athletic, bucolic
and folk-art virtues of nature-bound, egalitarian communities.

 In the famous Second and Third Maxims of Book IV of his treatise on
education, Rousseau says: ‘One pities in others only those ills from which one
does not feel oneself exempt’. And: ‘The pity one has for another’s misfortune is
measured not by the quantity of that misfortune but by the sentiment which one
attributes to those who suffer it’.10 These maxims are the kernel of a manifesto
for solidarity. Pray consider: Rousseau does not presuppose anything else but
bare humanity in any individual. This presupposition is purely personal,
subjective, psychological – available through introspection. It is based, as is well
known, on fear: fear of suffering, which we can understand in others as well.
There is no external or ‘objective’ measure for suffering, nor is there any need
for it; it is sufficient for us to have a feeling for the perils lurking around us in
order to have a feeling for the probable predicament of others. We pity others to
the extent of our understanding and sympathy for a situation we can imagine
ourselves to have been in, and to the extent of our picturing their feelings at such
a juncture. On this small foundation stone – a pebble, really – is the edifice of a
solidary community built.

To wish to put an end to imaginable and avoidable suffering is enough for the
construction of social justice, since fear and imagination are natural givens in
the human animal, but there is another hidden idea here, an idea even more
revolutionary. This we could call the rejection of any and all theodicy. The
church explains suffering by sin. How could a benevolent and omnipotent God
cause suffering and death? Only as a retribution for something inherent in all
humans but at the same time willed by all humans: the original sin of
disobedience. (Reductionist theories of human nature play the same role in
modern agnostic societies.) If we do not think that original sin is indeed inherent
in human nature, suffering is unnecessary; and vice versa, if suffering is felt and
understood in others, if then it can be counterbalanced by the succour of those
who may not be good but who have an instinctive distaste for the ominous threat
of visible misfortune in their environment – well, then the plausibility of original
sin seems remote.

Moreover, if suffering is avoidable, there is nothing to prevent us from

assuming that the alleviation of human suffering is a duty. We are bound by
duty only in cases that appear feasible. But if suffering is not natural, in the
sense that it is not a necessary consequence of our natures, then it must be social
and historical, subject to change – and why should we not hasten that change? If,
say, inequality is caused by natural selection, revolutions are meaningless; if it is
not, making revolutions is meritorious.

Rousseauian socialism is anti-theodicy; it opposes the tragic and conservative

view of original sin or natural fatum with the splendid philosophical fiction of
free-born men and women who are everywhere in chains. If the free-born are
reduced to a servile condition, the culprit cannot but be society, the wrong kind
of society. If human nature does not need to be moulded to be receptive to
freedom since we are free by definition, it is social organization that wants
changing.

Human nature being tantamount to liberty, our true nature is the source of the
liberty that is falsified and denied to us; hence the assumption that those
enslaved are morally superior to the slavers. Rousseau’s theory suggests that
there is a separate culture and a separate morality inherent in the people; a
culture and a morality that attracts the sympathy and the solidarity of all persons
of good faith.

This brings us back to E.P. Thompson’s Rousseauian socialism. He formu-

lated the matter with classical simplicity when he described 18th century
radicalism’s
 … profound distrust of the ‘reasons’ of the genteel and comfortable, and
of ecclesiastical and academic institutions, not so much because they
produced false knowledges but because they offered specious apologetics
(‘serpent reasonings’) for a rotten social order based, in the last resort,
on violence and material self-interest …. And to this we must add a …
cultural or intellectual definition of ‘class’. Everything in the age of
‘reason’ and ‘elegance’ served to emphasise the sharp distinctions
between a polite and a demotic culture. Dress, style, gesture, proprieties
of speech, grammar and even punctuation were resonant with the signs
of class; the polite culture was an elaborated code of social inclusion
and exclusion. Classical learning and an accomplishment in the law
stood as difficult gates-of-entry into this culture …. These
accomplishments both legitimated and masked the actualities of brute
property and power, interest and patronage. A grammatical or
mythological solecism marked the intruder down as an outsider.11

Thompson is quite right: since Parmenides, ‘reason’ has always or nearly

always been a symbolic mark of ideological mastery, opposed to ‘the people’ as
the repository of unreason.12 But the trouble with Rousseauian socialism is not
that it unmasks the high-falutin pretensions of ruling-class doctrine, but that in
doing so it treats the ‘demotic’ as ‘natural’. Whatever seems to be beyond the
ken of demotic culture (and in our case, working-class culture but in Rousseau’s
case, peasant folklore), Rousseauian socialism holds to be unnecessary or
artificial. This would be true only if the proletariat were pristinely self-created
and not the complicated product of capitalist society.

The main idea of Rousseauian socialism is, obviously, equality. Equality is a

many-sided notion, but within this tradition it means the renunciation of the
superfluous, from luxury to the cultivation of the self, from agonistic
competition (resulting in excellence) to the enjoyment of high art divorced from
the needs of the community. The Greek word for equality, homonoia, also
means etymologically ‘being of one mind’. The Rousseauian community is
frugal, musical and martial. It is hostile to individuation and text.13 It is also
hostile to opinion. Opinion is an aspect of sociability in bourgeois society, while
being the traditional enemy of philosophy, the counterpart of the quest for truth.
The empty variety of individual opinions is reducible to a mind bent to the
service of powerful interests, an expression of the self which is neither a result
of an unbiased, dispassionate contemplation of reality (nature) nor an authentic
outward sign of inner feeling. The competition of diverse opinions is not even a
competition of egos for their own sake, merely a competition for quick
adaptation to the demands of power with the aim of advancement: an adaptation
without a true belief in the excellence of the opinion assumed.14 Bourgeois
sociability is false, the people – restored to its natural status – is (or was)
authentic. ‘True feeling’ as the criterion of adequate elementary morality is
reminiscent of the Calvinistic idea of ‘justifying faith’ in Rousseau’s Geneva.15

Equality, thus, is opposed not only to hierarchy, but to variety or diversity as

well. The expression ‘chattering classes’ was invented much later by Don Juan
Donoso Cortés, but Rousseau was certainly opposed to Öffentlichkeit qua
‘talking shop’. Opinion as instrument is a travesty of any honourable intellectual
endeavour. The same would go, I am afraid, for any ‘freedom of expression’
conducive to a frivolous parataxis of competing egotisms. Rousseauian
socialism is moralistic, not historicist. Lukács said that nature becomes
landscape when one looks at it as it were from outside, when one is separated
from it. For Rousseau and the Rousseauians, ‘the people’ is nature not land-
scape; it is not considered from afar. Solidarity, pity, sympathy have ordained
closeness. Propinquity enjoins a modesty of political aims. The emancipation of
the people does not mean the abolition of the people (as in Marx the
emancipation of the proletariat means – decisively – the self-abolition of the
proletariat). It means the abolition of aristocracy and clergy; basically, it is not
the abolition of ‘class’ but the abolition of ‘caste’ or ‘estate’, whereby the Third
Estate – the commoners – become The Nation.

THE ACTUALLY-EXISTING WORKING CLASS (AND

BOURGEOISIE)

Why (and how) could modern socialists mistake the abolition of caste for the
abolition of class? There are several reasons.

One is the oldest conundrum of the workers’ movement, to wit, the fact that
wherever successful proletarian movements or revolutions have taken place,
they triumphed not against capitalism, but against quasi-feudal remnants of the
old regime that, naturally, went against their self-understanding and their self-
image. All the endlessly complicated debates about class consciousness are
influenced by this primordial fact. This is also why Arno Mayer’s theory
concerning ‘the persistence of the old regime’ is so crucial to Marxist debates.16

Class struggle, as prosecuted by the workers’ movement, instead of extolling

the paradoxical, demonic ‘virtues’ of capitalism, was forced not only to attack it,
but also to defend itself. It defended itself by insisting on the excellence of the
‘Grand Old Cause’, the moral superiority of those who fought for working-class
autonomy, supposing they were an exception to the general rule of bourgeois
society. This resulted in an enduring achievement which lasted about a century,
from the 1870s to the 1970s: the creation of a counter-power of working-class
trade unions and parties, with their own savings banks, health and pension
funds, newspapers, extramural popular academies, workingmen’s clubs,
libraries, choirs, brass bands, engagé intellectuals, songs, novels, philosophical
treatises, learned journals, pamphlets, well-entrenched local governments,
temperance societies – all with their own mores, manners and style. A
Hungarian sociological survey from 1906 shows that a working-class housing
estate in Transylvania has one portrait of Marx and one of Lassalle per flat,
workers are teetotal in a heavily drinking society, and open atheists and
anticlericalists in a polity dominated by the church militant; church weddings
are frowned upon, there are attempts at a healthy diet, non-competitive sports
(not shared with outsiders) are encouraged (in Central Europe there were special
socialist workers’ athletic championships and mass musical choir contests until
1945); non-socialist charities are rejected, parties are held only in daylight to
avoid immorality, and at least the men are trying – in a country of barefoot
illiterates one generation away from the village primeval – to read social science
and serious history. Admirable as this is, it must have been, for all intents and
purposes, a sect.

This counter-power developed its own political superstructure and ideology,

from ‘reformist’ social democracy to revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism, a
whole separate world where the bourgeoisie’s writ did not run.17 The amal-
gamation of Rousseauian and Marxian socialism resulted from the special
interests of this established counter-power or adversary power: the workers’
movement was often Rousseauist in regard to itself and Marxist in regard to the
bourgeois enemy.

What did this mean in terms of its struggle? In the nineteenth century there
had to be struggles against throne and altar, for universal suffrage, for the right
to organize and to strike; then national unity was re-forged in the Great War as if
the class struggle could be switched off at will; after that war the proletariat
liberated the miserable Eastern peasantry that had been kept in a servile
condition (this was the most massive historical achievement of the communist
regimes18); later it had to create Popular Fronts and Résistance alliances against
the fascist peril – there was always something that prevented proletarian politics
(in Marx’s sense), apart from heroic episodes by revolutionary minorities.

The reasons for this in post-1914 socialism seem self-evident: the need for
self-legitimation of the workers’ movement in view of its defeat but persisting
power, and its repeated contribution to bourgeois revolutions liquidating the
semi-feudal remnants of the old regime. A dispensation oriented to transcending
capitalism remained – and still remains – utopian, while the ‘secular’ triumph of
social democracy in the West and the transformation of the old regime into a
tyrannical state capitalism under Bolshevik rule in the East offered a vindication
for the movement, justified mainly by a puritanical and egalitarian system closer
to Calvin’s and Rousseau’s Geneva than to Marx’s classical Walpurgis
night.19 ‘Welfarism’ was not limited to the West: the Soviet bloc’s idea of
legitimacy was also a steady growth of income, leisure and accessible social and
health services. ‘Planning’ was a common idea of Mao’s Red China and de
Gaulle’s bourgeois and patriotarde and pompiériste France. Jacobinism was
common to both. The staatstragende community, the addressee of welfare
statism and egalitarianism, had to be defined somehow: it was the people,
offered equal dignity by ‘citizenship’.

To help us understand this properly, it is useful to return to what Thompson

was complaining about in his debate with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. In a
celebrated series of essays,20 they tried to demonstrate that the weaknesses of
the British workers’ movement were caused by a peculiarity of British
capitalism: it was the economic preponderance of efficient and market-friendly
farming on the great estates and the disproportionate political influence of the
landed aristocracy, both richer and more powerful than the incipient bourgeoisie
– if there is such a thing (culturally) at all in England – that limited the breadth
of vision, the vigour and the scope of any proletarian socialism in the British
Isles. This was also, according to Anderson, the reason for England’s subsequent
decline in all the respects that are crucial to the criteria of European ‘modernity’,
including an astonishingly large number of blind spots in British ‘high culture’,
especially in the so-called social and human sciences.21

The great emotional force of ‘class’ as a special English socio-

cultural problem – defined in the common usage as an intricate system of almost
tribal markers such as diction, dress, speech habits, even posture, forms (and
ritualistic denials) of courtesy, diet and the like – has its roots in this. These
caste-like, sometimes quasi-ethnic differences of ‘class’ gave a special cachet to
the class struggle in England, denying the possibility of a bourgeois-Jacobin
ideology of ‘community’ or ‘national unity’. Conservatives on the Continent
would vehemently deny the mere existence of the class struggle, but High Tory
ranters and satirists like, say, Peregrine Worsthorne or Auberon Waugh (indeed,
both Waughs, père et fils), would declare their enjoyment in doing down the
widow and the orphan, and were constantly waging a gallant fight against the
vulgarian with his ‘job’, ‘holiday’, ‘telly’ and ‘pop “music”’. In England, the
class enemy was highly visible, but he or she was never or almost never ‘the
bourgeois’, but ‘the toff’, ‘the terrific swell’ opposed to those who were
common as muck. Even today the supposedly yuppified, classless ‘estuary
English’ has a ‘posh’ version.

All this has pre-modern accents. It seems obvious that for the creation of ‘a
people’ the annihilation of the upper classes would be necessary, as in
eighteenth-century France, where only the Third Estate became the nation and
where class relations had been ethnicized (the aristocracy: Nordic; the people:
Celtic, Gallic; cf. Norman blood in England, Varangians in Russia, etc.). Class
identity of this kind is definitely pre-socialist. Socialist movements had used it in
the past, creating enormous difficulties for themselves later. Its use succeeded
only where they could combine the specific demands of the usually small and
culturally (and sometimes ethnically) ‘different’ proletariat, with the general (or
‘bourgeois’) democratic enthusiasms of the usually peasant, provincial majority
led by the middle classes and journalistic opinion: for republic instead of
monarchy, universal suffrage, anti-clericalism (or laïcité), agrarian reform (i.e.,
redistribution of land), reduction of birth privileges, a citizen army, ethnic
minority rights, votes for women, and the like.

This was a fundamental dilemma of Austro-Hungarian and Russian social

democracy and, later, of East and South Asian communism (in India and Nepal,
to this very day). During the belle époque, socialism in the East was faced with
either the prospect of victory at the helm of a bourgeois democratic revolution
against an aristocratic old regime with elements of modernizing militarism (die
Soldateska), or certain defeat and annihilation while preserving the purity of the
‘Western’ proletarian idea. When Gramsci called the October revolution in
Russia a ‘revolution against Das Kapital’, he was apposite and to the point in
this sense (not that Lenin and Trotsky knew exactly what they were doing). But
even earlier, it was clear that universal suffrage, socio-cultural egalitarianism,
democratic parliamentarism and a more secular and tolerant, less militaristic
society would be realized east of the Rhine, south of the Alps and west of the
Pyrénées, only by the socialist movement, not by the feeble liberal bourgeoisie,
in predominantly farming societies.

On the whole, socialists decided to assume the leadership of non-socialist,

democratic revolutions. The result was nationalism, both in the debacle of
August 1914 and in the unavoidable transformation of Leninism into Stalinism.
The truth is that modern capitalist societies as we know them today would have
been entirely impossible without movements whose ‘false consciousness’ was
precisely socialism. Socialism as a political movement was a tool of capitalist
modernization not only in the East, but also in Central and Western Europe; the
bourgeoisie itself did, historically speaking, very little by way of creating, or
even fighting for, modern capitalist society.22 Let us recall that the allegedly
bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth century were invariably led by the
landed gentry; these revolutions had been completed in Central and Eastern
Europe in 1918-19 by the socialist workers’ movement – this latter case being
one of the most important and most neglected aspects of the vexed problem of
the origins of fascism and national socialism, directed both against the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This may sound strange to Western ears, but is
thoroughly comprehensible for a German, an Italian, an Austrian or a Hungarian
of a certain age and/or Bildung.23
 The bourgeoisie wrought gigantic changes in the texture of the world –
economic, social, technological, scientific, artistic and ideological – but almost
nowhere did it play a leading political role.24 Bourgeois power (even social and
cultural hegemony) proved impossible in the absence of a modern (in practice, a
Lassallean-Marxist) socialist movement. This seems to be the unspoken, never
openly stated conclusion of the debate between Anderson, Nairn and their
adversaries. The decline of England, the unchanging personnel of British politics
and public administration and the other elements of decadence so poignantly and
pugnaciously described by Anderson and Nairn must be – at least partially –
caused by the lack of a modernizing revolution led by the proletariat. It is, I
believe, rather significant that the most ‘contemporary’ ideological campaign in
favour of a modern capitalism in Britain was conceived not by mainstream
liberal or social democratic (‘labourite’) tendencies, but by a côterie of former
communists (the ‘New Times’ crowd around Marxism Today, a once-
Communist monthly). When English Marxists like Anderson and Nairn were
discussing the lack of a revolutionary bourgeoisie in Britain, they must have
been painfully aware of the even more glaring lack of a revolutionary workers’
movement, which seems to have been the only effective weapon against any
kind of aristocratic rule, wherever such a rule existed and persisted. But they
were more or less hobbled by their desire for an authentic proletarian revolution
which has never occurred in its anti-capitalist purity anywhere – yet.

This perhaps explains why the origin of capitalism, especially English capi-
talism, is such an important political question or Kampffrage. The ‘Brenner
Debate’ was and remains decisive in this respect. But it is in the work of Ellen
Meiksins Wood that all the threads come together, and the theoretical and
political consequences are most clearly stated.25 Answering Anderson’s harsh
questions about ‘the “absent centre” of English social thought’, Wood insisted:
‘The individualism and ahistoricism of English social thought, its fragmentation,
have more to do, then, with the advance of capitalism than with its
inhibition’.26 She characterizes the parallel and contrast with continental Europe
thus:

While in France Bodin was describing the state as a unity of ‘families,

colleges or corporate bodies’, Sir Thomas Smith defined the
commonwealth as a ‘multitude’ of free individuals. While the French
state continued to serve as a lucrative resource for the propertied
classes, the English were increasingly preoccupied with individual
appropriation by purely ‘economic’ means.… The replacement of
corporate entities by individuals as the constituent units of society, the
separation of the state and civil society, the autonomization of the
‘economy’ – all these factors associated with the evolution of English
capitalism conduced to the atomization of the social world into discrete
 and separate theoretical spheres. And with it came a detachment of the
social sciences from history, as social relations and processes came to
be conceived as natural, answering to the universal laws of the economy
….27

This seems to be the very opposite of Perry Anderson’s view. But it is, at the
same time, another Marxian correction of E.P. Thompson’s Rousseauism. The
emphasis in Wood’s work on the separateness or autonomy of the ‘economy’
and ‘the economic’ points, rather promisingly, I think, towards a much-needed
Marxian political science. This autonomy of the economy may account for
peculiarities in English political culture that would, according to Perry
Anderson, explain the lack of a radical socialism in Britain, the substitution of
‘class culture’ for ‘class’ and the notorious (and idealized) absence of great,
salvific social theorems in the national culture. But the sudden modernization of
Britain under Thatcher and Blair yields surprising results, as Anderson himself
recognizes in another of his breathtaking surveys:

By the [nineteen-]eighties, the net effect of these changes was a marked

disjuncture between high culture and politics in Britain. In most
European cultures, such a pattern has historically been quite frequent. In
many, indeed, the normal stance of intellectuals has tended to be
oppositional, swinging against the pendulum of regimes rather than with
it. In England, this has not been so. Here, the larger portion of the
intelligentsia has generally sung in harmony, if not unison, with the
established power of the day, from the time of Coleridge’s first scoring of
its part after the Napoleonic wars. The present position is an anomaly in
this record ….28

Nevertheless, the problem remains: part of the Left will see ‘class’ in cultural
and political terms, and this is indeed an effective aid to sustaining an opposi-
tional stance against ‘a rotten regime’ in the name and on behalf of a people
judged capable of achieving for itself a cultural and moral autonomy vouchsafed
by a working-class politics.29 The case of England is crucial for several reasons:
it is traditionally ‘the distant mirror’ of capitalism.30 It cannot possibly be
denied that the shift to culture in class theory was and is caused by the fate of
socialism (i.e., of the workers’ movement): to succeed only in the sense of
making capitalism more modern, democratic, secular and (perhaps) egalitarian
via cross-class alliances forces the workers’ movement to abandon the specific
proletarian calling envisaged by Marx. Western and Northern social democrats,
Eastern and Southern communists alike have replaced emancipation with
equality, Marx with Rousseau. Marxian socialism has never been attempted
politically, especially not by Marxists.31 Egalitarianism and statism (in
democratic and tyrannical versions) were the hallmarks of the main official
versions of socialism, everywhere.

These are also the key elements of the contemporary popular image of
socialism, and the key elements of the colourful pop ideology of the ‘new social
movements’ as well, aiming at righting injustice by enlarging and radicalizing
the idea of equality and trying to impose this idea on the bourgeois states and
international financial organizations they despise (they themselves do not wish
to take power; theirs is an étatisme by proxy). The ‘statism by proxy’ of the new
social movements (we won’t vote for you, we won’t smash your power through
revolution, but we want you to draft bills and pass acts of parliament and UN
and EU resolutions that we deem useful and edifying), in spite of their many
beauties and quite a few successes, is still statism, experimenting with a radical
idea of equality of all living beings, hesitating between straight reformism and
utopian self-sufficiency and exodus.

The retreat to egalitarianism, statism and ‘culture’ thus appears to be a quasi-

permanent feature of socialist movements. In almost every case, this can only be
explained by the fact that they must engage with an adversary, bourgeois
society, which is replete with historical imperfections derived from the caste
societies out of which they emerged.

FROM CASTE TO CLASS TO PEOPLE

That the retreat from Marx to Rousseau is a also tendency among Marxists, as in

the most important case of E.P. Thompson, is of particular importance.
Technically, this is sometimes a reaction against an alleged rigid determinism in
Marxian class theory (an allegation effectively refuted by G.A. Cohen32), but
more frequently (again, also in E.P. Thompson’s case) it happens owing to a
fatal misunderstanding concerning the conflation of ‘class’ and ‘caste’
(Stände, états, or, in Hungarian, rendek). Caste society, the remnants of which
are still with us, even today, is based on a view of human nature radically
different from the Enlightenment view, so ingrained in modern thinking as to be
almost invisible and implicit, scarcely in need of being articulated.

For most of history, humanity was not thought to have been co-extensive with
humankind. Women, slaves, foreigners, children were almost invariably
excluded everywhere, but so were people who had to work for a living
(banausoi), people who had become retainers in a chieftain’s retinue, persons
exercising trades that were ideologically considered repellant or religiously
taboo, people with physical deficiencies, whole nations subjugated in war,
persons belonging to another religion or denomination, persons without
property, enemies of the state, members of ‘inferior’ races, and so on. These and
many others were not supposed to share with the rest the prerogatives of full-
fledged human beings. There was resistance to this state of affairs among some
Stoics, Cynics and Epicureans, the early Christians and some medieval heretics,
some Buddhists and other assorted riff-raff. But on the whole the title of ‘man’
(let alone of ‘citizen’, which is still limited by nation-states33) was a prerogative
circumscribed by criteria of excellence, hence the absence of an idea of equal
and universal rights and obligations.

Caste or ‘estate’ is a whole life, with dimensions capitalism has since nullified.
Let me quote a few words from the greatest authority on the caste system:

… the lot of the Shudras is to serve, and … the Vaishyas are the grazers
of cattle and the farmers, the ‘purveyors’ of sacrifice … who have been
given dominion over the animals, whereas the Brahmans-Kshatryas have
been given dominion over ‘all creatures’.… [T]he Kshatrya may order a
sacrifice as may the Vaishya, but only the Brahman may perform it. The
king is thus deprived of any sacerdotal function …. The Brahman
naturally has privileges …. He is inviolable (the murder of a Brahman is,
with the murder of a cow, the cardinal sin), and a number of
punishments do not apply to him: he cannot be beaten, put in irons, fined,
or expelled ….34

The contrast with modern capitalist society could not be more obvious: each
caste (or estate) is a complete way of life, embodying a cosmological principle.
Caste is a differential system of privileges, endowments and ‘gifts’ which
represent a model of the social world, based on a philosophical doctrine
concerning human functions and a scale of values, embodied by various closed
groups whose commerce with one another is a function of their respective rungs
on the ladder of human values, religiously determined. All this is strengthened
by a well-entrenched system of prejudices. The English word villain,
French villain, has its origin in the late Latin villanus, villager, peasant.
‘Ignoble’ originally means a person devoid of noble rank. The
Hungarian paraszt, ‘peasant’ originates in the Slav stem prost, ‘simpleton’, etc.,
all signs that contempt and deference did not need excuses. Medieval ditties
made fun of hunchbacks, beggars, cripples, fat people and, simply, the poor.
Explanations for the ill-fate of some were, apart from social theodicy, racial and
warlike. The upper castes were (in the whole Indo-European area) supposed to
be fair, the servants, the aborigines, the slaves, the foreigners, swarthy.35

The tripartite scheme of social hierarchy (oratores, bellatores, laboratores)

does indeed identify social groups with human functions, but in ascribing func-
tion to person and group and vice versa, if these persons and groups remain
within their prescribed or pre-ordained confines, it absolves them from
responsibility: responsibility is conceivable only in transgression, not by the fact
of differential human condition, such as membership in a social class. Choice
(and the ‘quality’ of the individual) does not enter it at all, and therefore misery
does not need the intricate theodicy which is the bad luck of Christendom.

The target of egalitarian rebellion was always this ascription and adjudication,
i.e., doubt concerning just deserts, and ambiguity of the idea of ‘God’s children’
and the radical distinctions regarding dignity (and the sheer scope of human life)
inherent in caste society. The complaint that kings and barons are not chivalrous
and gallant, that monks and nuns are not sagacious and chaste, is perennial. For
the rebels, the world is turned upside down, merit trampled underfoot, while
crime is rewarded with honours and plenty. Virtue, unlike moral goodness or
intelligence, adheres to caste, not to persons or to humanity as such. What is
virtue for one caste, is not for another. Pride is good in one, humility in another.
Achilles, the greatest warrior, is incomprehensible apart from his semi-divine,
princely heroism which coexists with extreme prickliness and sensitivity and a
morbid preoccupation with slights and with the insufficient deference shown to
him by equals whom he was bound to consider inferiors – a universal type
encountered in ancient epics. Heroism is very much a matter of bodily integrity
and beauty, athleticism, elegance, sexual glamour and a pronounced distaste for
being ‘dissed’. Heroism is play and display; all this is allowed under the
disquieting but glorious threat of death on the battlefield, the untimely deaths of
rich young men.36

In sharp contrast with caste, class is an abstraction (I do not mean only a

scientific idealization, but a lived abstraction as well) in a society where freedom
of contract exists. In such a society subordination, hierarchy, domination, rank,
dignity, etc., are not only random, totally unconnected to the quality of the
individual, but also seen as such. Fate is no longer, as in Greek tragedy or
Corneille (and as late as Kleist), an accident of birth, but an accident of the
social division of labour and other similar historical kinds of serendipity.

If it is true, and I think it is, that Marx’s theory does not purport to be a theory
of human nature as such, but a theory of capitalism, then the immortal words
of The Communist Manifesto, according to which ‘[t]he history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles’, must be false. Class is unique
to capitalist society. Class is, first of all, a structural feature of the system;
belonging to a class is a condition legally and, quite often, socially, open to
anybody. This openness of class as a contingent social position is what makes
capitalism great and gives it the aura of Mephistophelian liberation through ever
‘more extensive and more destructive crises’, as the Manifesto also puts it. In
order to achieve this gigantic ‘creative destruction’ (an expression of
Schumpeter’s inspired by Bakunin) there was a need to unleash the forces of
individual freedom – a freedom, that is, from a legally and coercively enforced
classification of human beings into groups of birth and status.
 Addressing class as such is, intuitively, very difficult.

Within the production process, the separation of labour from its

objective moments of existence – instruments and material –
is suspended. The existence of capital and of wage labour rests on this
separation. Capital does not pay for the suspension of this separation
which proceeds in the real production process – for otherwise work
could not go on at all.… But as use value, labour belongs to the
capitalist; it belongs to the worker merely as exchange value. Its living
quality of preserving objectified labour time by using it as the objective
condition of living labour in the production process is none of the
worker’s business. This appropriation, by means of which living labour
makes instrument and material in the production process into the body
of its soul and thereby resurrects them from the dead, does indeed stand
in antithesis to the fact that labour itself is objectless, is a reality only in
the immediate vitality of the worker – and that the instrument and
material, in capital, exist as being-for-themselves.… But to the extent
that labour steps into this relation [with its moments of material being],
this relation exists not for itself, but for capital; labour itself has become
a moment of capital’.37

The distinction between castes could not be farther away from this portrait of
the worker who may be alienated and exploited, but certainly is no stranger to
capital; on the contrary, he is one of its ‘moments’, one of its structural features.
This is clearly not something anybody could abolish by decree or by law. If the
worker is a feature of capital, the worker can change capitalism into something
else only if he or she changes himself or herself, in an extra-moral sense.

Looked at from the ulterior vantage-point of the revolutionary, we may rather

confidently say that the abolition of caste leads to equality; but the abolition of
class leads to socialism. Yet as we have seen, the retreat from socialism to
egalitarianism, from Marx to Rousseau, the retreat from critical theory to
ahistorical moral critique, from Hegel and Marx to Kant, has been the rule,
rather than the exception, in the history of the Left. It is therefore in need of
some explanation.

First, one has to take into account the psychological needs of opposition to any
system one was brought up in. All social systems – through mythologies,
patriotic chronicles, traditions and the like – pretend and, indeed, must pretend
that they are natural, and that their failings are due to inherent clashes within
human nature, and that unhappiness all too obviously caused by impersonal
factors is somehow retribution, either visited upon people because of their
imperfections, or because of some fatal breakdown in the system itself caused
by ingratitude, impiety or the inscrutable decree of a higher force of some kind.
Blaming the system will always appear as an easy pretext for failing to blame
oneself, dissatisfaction being always regarded as a weakness of the unsuccessful,
of the insufficiently noble or the insufficiently insightful – in short, of the
Thersites of this world. People have to be on a solid moral footing if they are to
dare to say ‘no’. Thus, it seems necessary to establish that there is an innate
excellence residing in those who have been held by the ruling order to be
inferior, and that the inversion of the established moral order or moral hierarchy
happens to be both the superior truth and a satisfactory motivation for its
reversal. The oldest rhetorical tricks can be employed here:

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that
hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye
shall laugh. Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they
shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast
out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake…. But woe unto you that
are rich! For ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are
full! For ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! For ye shall
mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!
For so did their fathers to the false prophets. But I say unto you which
hear, Love your enemies, do good to them, which hate you, Bless them
that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.38

The moral order is reversed, but even the threat of that reversal is turned
upside down, for those who would suddenly find themselves at the bottom of the
moral heap will be forgiven and saved. This sums up nearly all revolutionary
manifestoes we can think of. The scary flip of the moral coin is made
unthreatening – even the frightening curse, ‘ye shall mourn and weep’ is made
good – by the invocation of universality: ‘love your enemies’. But the right to
forgive will be conferred upon those who did not have the power to forgive, and
thus to condemn, before. Power is being taken away and given anew, this is why
the Son of Man is also called the Lord.

A second reason why the retreat from socialism to egalitarianism has been the
rule is the need for a trans-social or meta-social foundation for the possibility of
a change which might reduce or even obliterate injustice and domination. This is
(intuitively) the suppleness, the plasticity, the flexibility, the malleability of
human nature and the randomness of intellectual, aesthetic or physical
endowment, distributed capriciously among all ranks, races, creeds and
provinces. In other words: a belief in the possibility of equality without
upsetting too much the shape of society which – even if equality of income,
opportunity, status and access to political power were achieved – would still
contain elements of domination, either by government (tempered by law) or by
various social hierarchies of command and control in the workplace, education
and family, as well as a continuing social division of labour.

But domination married to equality would not contradict the possibility of

equality only if the perpetual re-creation of inequalities is constantly upset by
new forces ‘from below’ which constantly re-establish
equality.39 Redistribution (the only way to perpetually impose and re-impose
equality if the other customary aspects of society remain essentially the same)
can be implemented only by an extremely strong state able to defeat the
resistance of those from whom something shall be taken away. But the strength
of the state is apt to reinforce domination concentrated in the hands of the few,
which will, then, further reinforce domination, naturally unfavourable to an
equality of condition or of social positions and so on without end. All this is
likely, though, only if the malleability of human nature is allowed free rein by
the dominant or ‘hegemonic’ culture; hence the
permanent Kulturkampf concerning the pre-social or ‘natural’ equality of
persons before redistribution, from ‘blue blood’ to natural selection to the Bell
curve.40

Third, egalitarianism was (and up to a point, still is) an expression of a

dynamic of individuals uprooted from ‘caste’. As well as fighting against the
market system, socialists found themselves still fighting against the remnants of
a feudal order, i.e., for a system where surplus value would be extracted on the
market (from people legally free and assenting to obligations arising from
contract), not through coercion and social-cum-religious conditioning. Put more
simply, they had to execute successful bourgeois and proletarian revolutions at
the same time. Hence the endless wrangling of nineteenth-century social
democrats about the problem of the peasantry, when they sometimes had to
advocate the creation of competitive small farm businesses in order to win the
rural allies they needed to enable them to smash the landed aristocracy and
gentry, the political ruling stratum of most countries until quite
recently.41 Central European socialists (especially in Germany and Austria-
Hungary) worried a great deal about their capitalism not being created by an
autochthonous bourgeoisie, but in fact this was much more generally
true.42 The problem of Kautsky and Lenin (and Luxemburg and Szabó and
Dobrogeanu-Gherea and Mariátegui) may actually be a universal problem.

Fourth, et nunc venio ad fortissimum, there is a deep moral and psychological

difficulty with Marxism, intertwined with the historical problematic. Marxism,
after all, proposes the abolition of the proletariat, not its apotheosis. Because of
reification and alienation, it holds with Simone Weil that la condition ouvrière,
being a worker, is the worst condition a human being can find herself or himself
in. (And Simone Weil is quite right in believing that perfect solidarity with the
working class means the assumption of, and acquiescence in, servitude and
squalor. But this is, of course, the opposite of the sense of solidarity in the
tradition of non-Marxian socialism.) The meaning of Rousseauian socialism is
the re-establishment of the purity of the people through the forcible destitution
of the upper castes and the exclusion of extraneous economic elements such as
commerce; the people is held to be capable of discovering its virtue, which has
been obliterated or corrupted by oppression and inequality, servitude and
deference. This presupposes an Essence of Man to be found through
philosophical means, an essence whose vacuity historical materialism was
created to demonstrate. The ‘enlargement’ of Marxism in the normative sense
(with, usually, some kind of Kantian moral philosophy) nearly always means a
retreat towards equality and Rousseau.43

On the other hand, this ever-recurring retreat makes good psychological sense.
It is well-nigh impossible to wage a battle to the death (which revolution,
however slow and gradual, necessarily is) if there is no sense that it is fought on
behalf of people who deserve sacrifice, whose cause is morally superior
because they are superior to the foe. The anti-luxury ideas of Rousseau and his
countless ideological forebears declare ‘the great and the good’ to be
superfluous. This notion may be plausible (although still unpleasant) in the case
of caste society, but in the case of class society, Marx is adamant that

… in my presentation, capital profit is not ‘merely a deduction or

“robbery” on the labourer’. On the contrary, I present the capitalist as
the necessary functionary of capitalist production and show very
extensively that he does not only ‘deduct’ or ‘rob’, but forces
the production of surplus value, therefore the deducting only helps to
produce; furthermore, I show in detail that even if in the exchange of
commodities only equivalents were exchanged, the capitalist – as soon
as he pays the labourer the real value of his labour-power – would
secure with full rights, i.e. the rights corresponding to that mode of
production, surplus value.44

This is not consonant with the millenary voice of rebellion. That voice, on the
contrary, tells us that ‘we was robbed’, the thrifty by the thriftless. That honest
toil was not paid in full, owing to the superior coercive power of the mighty.
That ascribing a necessary ‘productive’ role to the ruling classes is pernicious
‘ideological’ mendacity. All value is created by the workers – this is Lassalle’s
view, and not Marx’s.45 All official and triumphant ‘socialist’ art from Soviet
social realism to Latin American muralists glorifies proletarian might, sinews,
purity, work and victorious confrontation with the puny and unclean enemy –
unlike the few works of art truly inspired by a Marxian vision, from George
Grosz and Gyula Derkovits to the more extreme avant-garde. These latter
creations are almost invariably dark and pessimistic. Their problem was
succinctly summarized by Georg Lukács thus: ‘[T]he objective reality of social
existence is in its immediacy “the same” for both proletariat and bourgeoisie’.46

The working class is not situated outside capitalism. It embodies capitalism as

much as the bourgeoisie does. In a way perhaps even more: reification touches it
in a radical manner. Nevertheless, Lukács emphasizes the inextricable
interrelatedness of ‘rationalization’ and irrationality brought about by capitalist
crises.47 The redemption of ‘social evil’ is possible only if ‘evil’ is separated
from the redeeming feature; but this is not feasible. Since it is not only classes,
i.e., human groups, that are divided from one another, but whole social spheres
and, especially and crucially, ‘the economy’, which is separated from the other
realms of social life by capitalism: the economy is quasi-liberated from the yoke
of bloodline (birth) and the ancient fusion of politics, religion and custom.48 But
the separation of the economy from the rest, owing to the specifically capitalist
method of extracting surpluses on the market, as it were ‘peacefully’, instead of
through direct coercion, as before, creates a commonality between the
fundamental classes in capitalism where the mere conquest of power by the
lower classes may not overcome the separation and therefore will fail to
establish a classless society – as has indeed happened.

The pressures which resulted in one of the characteristic abandonments of the

Marxian class view are impeccably described in another of Ellen Meiksins
Wood’s excellent books.49 In a series of sharpish attacks on a number of post-
Marxist semi-converts, she selected authors (whose subsequent careers she, on
the whole, accurately predicted) who tried – in view of the repeated defeats of
socialist movements and the even then perfectly clear cul-de-sac of communist
parties in or out of power – to find, at first, a substitute for the working class as
the vanguard of revolution; but unlike the New Left, not in the ‘person’ of Third
World peasants, inner-city blacks or young intellectuals, but in a new cross-class
coalition of rebellious ‘people’ desirous of a new kind of democracy. The
Retreat from Class shows how the transformed concept of ‘democracy’ (from
the ancient Greek understanding of it as the rule of the free-born poor, to the
idea of pluralism and the division of power, acceptable to the ruling class, so
much so that the original democratic idea came to be seen as ‘anti-democratic’)
contributed to the change of the socialist telos from an end to exploitation and
domination (ergo, classless society) into a mere hope for cultural ‘hegemony’. A
hegemony, that is, of egalitarian forces bent on abolishing discrimination,
privilege, social exclusion: but even within egalitarian discourse these authors
(Wood’s ‘new true socialists’) stressed recognition rather than redistribution (to
use Nancy Fraser’s subsequent phrase), and pluralism rather than
socialism.50 The problem here is basically the same as during the ‘revisionism’
debate around Eduard Bernstein’s book, or the ongoing quarrel on
‘reformism’.51

This weighty heritage inspires Rousseauian socialism. It is the rearguard battle

of ‘the people’ which is and isn’t identical with bourgeois society. This was
certainly what made Marat, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Desmoulins, Hébert and
Gracchus Babeuf so lofty and unforgiving: humiliation, not alienation. In semi-
feudal peasant societies, such as the countries of Eastern and Southern Europe in
the first half of the twentieth century, it was this, the spirit of jacquerie combined
with an intimation of a sansculotte revolution, which gave a special vigour and
savagery to the idea of ‘class’ and ‘socialism’, since both were combined with
strong remnants of ‘caste’ and ‘equality’. Neither Marat and Saint-Just, nor the
English Levellers and their successors about whom E.P. Thompson, Raymond
Williams, Christopher Hill, Raphael Samuel and their confederates wrote,
dreamed of a kind of egalitarian change that would be conducive to a society of
market, contract and money. But while overturning caste changes countless
things – hierarchy (status, if you wish), moral nomenclature, relations of
obedience and deference, prescribed biographies, connubiality and
commensality, spatiality and religion – it cannot touch the economy, which has
just come into its own right as an autonomous sphere of the human condition.
Above all, it does not replace hierarchy with equality, only caste (or estate) with
class.

This is what happened to West European social democracy and ‘euro-

communism’52 (and British radicalism from Lloyd George and Keir Hardie to
Attlee, Bevan, Laski and Beveridge), and to East European, Chinese and
Vietnamese ‘communism’: they have unwittingly and unwillingly either created
or reinforced and modernized capitalist society in their countries. It is not certain
that the anti-globalization movements of today, with their sincere calls for
planetary (the word ‘international’ is avoided nowadays, for some reason)
equality will not contribute to yet another rebirth of a more attractive, slimmed-
down, fairer and smarter capitalism, after destroying the superannuated global
financial institutions and the more shameless neo-conservative governments –
even though the anti-globalists, too, obviously want much, much more.

EPILOGUE

Our argument has established that revolutionary mobilization in the past was
almost invariably aimed at the economic, social, cultural, racial, legal, religious,
racial, sexual and intellectual humiliation inherent in ‘caste’; it was an
egalitarian mobilization against aristocratic orders of variegated kinds. It is true
that ‘democracy’ in practice never meant the effective rule of the lower orders,
albeit their influence has increased from time to time (never for long, though),
but it alleviated a burden we neglect too easily. Equality of dignity, the principle
of civic rights and liberties (even if most often honoured in the breach), shifted
the struggle for emancipation to new levels, both more profound and more
intractable.

Let’s not forget that bourgeois liberty, i.e., modern (liberal) capitalist class
society, was not quite safe until very recently. It should not be forgotten, either,
that this element played an important role in the anti-fascist struggle (not
understood by purely and uncompromisingly proletarian radicals like Amadeo
Bordiga and some, by no means all, left communists). An explanation is here in
order. Fascism and National Socialism are constantly interpreted, not without
justification, as instances of ‘reactionary modernism’, as a sub-species of
twentieth-century revolutionism, etc., initially in order to stress their not
negligible parallels and similarities with ‘communism’, especially Stalinism,
often under the aegis of the (untenable) ‘totalitarianism’ dogma. However
justified and novel these approaches were, they contributed to the (all too
frequent) neglect of the obvious. Southern and Catholic fascism wanted to
introduce the Ständestaat (always translated as ‘corporate state’ but literally
meaning ‘the state of estates’, a sort of new caste society), based on the theories
of Othmar Spann, Salazar and others, all inherited from Count Joseph de
Maistre, the Marquis de Bonald and Don Juan Donoso Cortés, with a mix of the
‘elite’ theories of Vilfredo Pareto and others. There were variants of the same
neo-feudalism in Nazism, too, with racist and sexist elements of ‘arischer
Männerbund’ (Aryan male fraternity) and similar pseudo-historical nonsense,
very much in vogue then among fashionable people like Carl Schmitt and others
of his ilk.

What all this verbiage amounted to was a quite serious attempt to re-introduce
caste society, that is, human groups with radically different entitlements and
duties (against uniformizing and levelling, ‘mechanistic’ conceptions of
egalitarian liberalism and socialism and bourgeois individualism): the Führ-
erprinzip in all occupations (witness Heidegger’s infamous ‘Rektoratsrede’, i.e.,
commencement address); vocational groups dissolving classes (e.g., steel-
workers would have meant, in the future, Krupp and Thyssen as well as the
steel-workers proper); untouchables (Jews and other condemned races), and so
on. The fascists were quite serious in wanting to go back to before 1789, as they
(or at least their predecessors) had been announcing loudly since the 1880s.
Since pre-modern and aristocratic memories were still alive in Central and
Southern Europe, the modernist-egalitarian impulse against fascism was quite
strong, and since this impulse was carried by the Left, and since the murderous
attack of fascism and Nazism was directed against them and the liberal
bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, small wonder that Popular Fronts were born and
were quite sincere in their fight against the revival of an oppressive past, and
against an anti-egalitarian and anti-Enlightenment obscurantism. This fight was
pre-socialist in its historical and ideological character, but unavoidable (and one
has to admire the gall of Horkheimer and Adorno in disregarding this aspect
altogether).

So, egalitarian, anti-aristocratic and anti-caste – thus ‘Rousseauian’ – struggles

were fully justified as late as the Second World War. We forget the backward-
looking character of fascism and Nazism at our own peril. Serious attempts to
create a new nobility were launched, beginning with the vitéz or warrior ‘estate’
in the first, radical phase of Vice-Admiral von Horthy’s counter-revolution in
Hungary and ending in Himmler’s SS mystique; the vitéz (former First World
War soldiers, commissioned and non-commissioned, of impeccably Gentile
ancestry) were offered land and a small stipend and were organized in quite an
effective knights’ order from 1920; their Supreme Captain was the Regent, von
Horthy, himself. The vitéz order was revived in Hungary after 1989, albeit only
as a nostalgic association of the extreme right. But ‘corporatist’ ideology is still
alive in contemporary Hungary; from time to time there are proposals to revive
an unelected upper chamber consisting of delegates of all ‘respectable
professions’, all the bishops, etc. Most recently such a proposal was advanced
by a ‘socialist’ prime minister, a former Communist central committee member.

But since the rather recent global triumph of capitalism, egalitarian mobi-
lizations against caste, although still the dominant form (viz. battles against
poverty, for jobs, against local and global discrimination, for gender and racial
equality, for fairness for the indigenous or ‘first’ peoples, and so on) appear
insufficient because inequality (if still a pertinent term at all) has different causes
from those it had in the past. When in the vast literature of the disillusioned Left
we read about the irrelevance of class, the vanishing proletariat, we can still see
the unconscious amalgamation of caste and class. Since the immanent, intra-
capitalist fight for equality led by socialists possessed by the ‘false
consciousness’ of fighting against alienation and exploitation, has ended; since
the historically forced synthesis of these two aspirations has been dissolved
through the final evanescence of the remains of aristocratic order, deference and
birth privilege; since the ‘socialist’ states have reverted to capitalist type, as a
result of the successful conquest of agrarian aristocratism by ‘communist’
parties;53 it is for the first time that pure capitalism makes an appearance.

One should be careful here. The historically-forced synthesis of egalitarianism

and socialism is obviously not over in the ‘developing’ world where egalitarian
movements based on the petty merchants of the bazaar, on the peasantry and the
lower clergy (‘Islamic radicalism’) are attacking the Westernized elites and
military states with an islamicized Khmer Rouge rhetoric or, in Latin America,
with an ‘indigenous’ millenarism. It is a telling fact that ‘revolutionary
openings’ are on offer again on capitalism’s periphery, where new strategies of
the ‘weakest link’ and of ‘combined and uneven development’ are reformulated
for the benefit of a new generation of ‘vicarious revolutionary’ dupes.

That said, on a global plane capitalism appears in the stark, unforgiving light
of its final triumph. It is completely, utterly, absolutely itself. It is like Rome
being perfectly realized in Byzantium. We reconstruct Roman society from the
legal documents written later and elsewhere, in which Roman law was
generalized and synthesized by people culturally remote from Latium but who
nevertheless understood, and what is more, lived and experienced ‘Rome’ in its
unadulterated Roman ‘haecceity’ as Romaioi. Balzac and Dickens might not be
able to understand the completed ultra-capitalism of today, but we see that we
are the accomplished heirs of their characters.

There has never been an experiment in Marxian socialism. It is an open

question if there can ever be one, if indeed Marx was right in his fundamental
assumptions. The stumbling block was and remains the paradox of class, that is,
of the exploited as a collective revolutionary agent. In the battle for equality
before the law, defining the task of the revolutionary agent was quite easy, as we
can see from the Putney Debates (1647) where Rainborough is arguing against
Ireton and Cromwell: since nobody is responsible for their mothers and fathers,
what can birthright then possibly mean? The claimants are outside, the lords
within; the former are clamouring to get in, the latter protesting against people
with no property, i.e., with no interest in the common weal, getting in; but
nobody doubts that it is worthwhile to be inside.54

In modern capitalism, there is no inside, as there is no upwards direction.

There is no route by which you can leave and there is no place that is funda-
mentally unlike yours and there is no one who is not, in some way, yourself. The
primary quality of labour – that which ought to be liberated by socialist action –
is not injustice. It is a general and irremediable divorce of persons’ inner forces,
desires and capacities, from the aims at the service of which they must develop
and exercise these forces. The best characterization I know of this is by Moishe
Postone:

Alienated labor … constitutes a social structure of abstract domination,

but such labour should not necessarily be equated with toil, oppression
or exploitation. The labour of a serf, a portion of which ‘belongs to’ the
feudal lord, is, in and of itself, not alienated: the domination and
exploitation of that labour is not intrinsic to the labour itself. It is
precisely for this reason that expropriation in such a situation was and
had to be based upon direct compulsion. Non-alienated labour in
societies in which a surplus exists and is expropriated by non-labouring
classes [‘castes’ in my sense, GMT] necessarily is bound to direct social
 domination. By contrast, exploitation and domination are integral
moments of commodity-determined labour.55

As far as we are aware, only direct (coercive) social domination was ever
overturned by popular revolt. As the experience of so-called ‘real socialism’
shows only too clearly, a change in legal ownership (of the means of production)
from that of private citizens or their associations to that of the state or
government means as little (for the workers) as the passage of a company from
ownership by a family into that of a pension fund. The ‘expropriation of the
expropriators’ did not end alienation. The illusion that capitalism was ever
defeated is linked to the non-Marxist idea of an anthropological turn away from
‘artificial’ society (the anarchy, wastefulness and inefficiency of the market,
self-destructive individualism, greed and assorted social pathologies, etc.) to true
human nature where people will act (not work) creatively after their hearts’
desire. This is, again, Rousseau, not Marx – or at least not the mature Marx – the
analyst of bourgeois society.56 Marx’s historicism is thorough and radical. He
did not describe the human condition when describing capitalism; indeed, his
description is meant as a refutation of any such idea, and this refutation is
pursued throughout his oeuvre. As Postone puts it: ‘The “essence” grasped by
Marx’s analysis is not that of human society but that of capitalism; it is to be
abolished, not realized, in overcoming that society’.57

Neither value nor labour are perennial qualities of human existence, nor is
class. Class, in contradistinction to ‘caste’, is not a framework for a whole life or
a Lebenswelt. This is why the disappearance of the cultural identity of the old
working class does not change the fundamental character of capitalism one whit.
Class, not being a human group with common interests and common moral and
cultural values such as, say, solidarity and contrariness, but a structural feature
of society, is not an actor. Contra E.P. Thompson, it is a ‘thing’.58

Class is that feature of capitalist society which divides it along the lines of
people’s respective positions in relation to reification/alienation, i.e., their
degree of autonomy vis-à-vis subordination to commodities and value. The
concomitant differences in wealth, access, etc., could, in principle, be remedied
by redistribution and mutual ‘recognition’. But greater equality of this kind
(which may appear as a utopia right now, but there are very strong forces
pushing towards that utopia which is well within the realm of possibilities) can
achieve better consumption, but not better ‘production’ – that is, not unalienated
labour. Equality, arrived at through redistribution, does not and cannot preclude
domination and hierarchy – a hierarchy moreover that, unlike in aristocratic
systems, does not build upon a cosmology and a metaphysics that could effect a
reconciliation with reality (and what else is reality than servitude and
dependence?).
 No doubt the cruelty, craftiness, low cunning and high logistics used in the
expropriation of surpluses goes on as always, but the enemy is less and less a
culturally circumscribed bourgeoisie as described in Benjamin’s Arcades
Project,59 but a capitalism without a proletariat – and without a bourgeoisie – at
least, without a proletariat and a bourgeoisie as we know them historically, as
two distinct cultural, ideological and status groups not only embodying,
but representing ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’.60 It is this representation which
happens to be obsolete, and perhaps it was secondary to begin with, in spite of
its mobilizing force which makes the blood flow faster when listening to
the Marseillaise or the Internationale (curiously, both were played at East Euro-
pean demonstrations at the beginning of the twentieth century).

The truth about class is not a proud self-representation through a legitimizing

ethic: this belongs to an era of conflict between rebellious universalism (read:
egalitarianism) and particularism (read: aristocratism and the esprit de corps of
haughty elites from dukes to abbots). The dominant ideology of the new,
purified capitalism is, naturally, freedom. Freedom, as conservatives have been
pointing out since the late eighteenth century, means the uprooting of
corporate, standesgemäß identities and replacing them with mobility, flexibility,
elasticity, ease, a propensity to, and a preference for, change. It is, in
appearance, ‘classless’. But it isn’t. It does not ‘prefer’ the bourgeoisie as a
closed, culturally identifiable, status group (‘estate’); instead it underpins capi-
talism as a system.

Some people mistake the absence of identifiable cultural and status groups on
either side of the class divide for an absence of class rule. But this is false. The
capitalist class rules, but it is anonymous and open, and therefore impossible to
hate, to storm, to chase away. So is the proletariat. Legal, political and cultural
equality (equality here only means a random distribution of – very real –
advantages and privileges) has made class conflict into what Capital makes it out
to be. Class conflict is dependent on the extraction of surplus, and it is not a
battle between two camps for superior recognition and a better position in the
scheme of (re)distribution. That battle goes on still, to be sure, but it is
essentially the battle of yesteryear. The bourgeoisie is by now incapable of
autonomous self-representation; the representation of its interests which is taken
over more and more by the state. Since the state represents, and looks after,
capitalism, the old-style self-representation of the working class is moribund,
too, but the state is not supplanted – as was the case, at least symbolically, in the
past – by political institutions of counter-power. Thus revolutionary proletarian
movements, although they now barely exist, are cast into the outer darkness.

The truth about class is, therefore, that the proletariat had, historically, two
contradictory objectives: one, to preserve itself as an estate with its own
institutions (trade unions, working-class parties, a socialist press, instruments of
self-help, etc.), and another one, to defeat its antagonist and to abolish itself as a
class. We can now see that the abolition of the working class as an ‘estate’, as a
‘guild’, has been effected by capitalism; capitalism has finally transformed the
proletariat (and the bourgeoisie) into a veritable class, putting an end to their
capacity for hegemony. Class hegemony of any kind (still quite vivacious and
vigorous in Gramsci’s time) was exactly what was annihilated. Class as an
economic reality exists, and it is as fundamental as ever, although it is culturally
and politically almost extinct. This is a triumph of capitalism.61

But this makes the historical work of destroying capitalism less parochial, it
makes it indeed as universal, as abstract and as powerful as capitalism itself.
What political form this may take, we don’t know.62 Nevertheless, it is now
truly the cause of humanity. There is no particular, local, vocational, ‘guild’ bias
to this cause, nor is any possible. The truth of class is of its own transcendence.
The proletariat of the Manifesto could stand outside because it could lose
nothing but its chains. No one is outside now – although not in the sense of
Antonio Negri: nation-states and classes continue to exist, and they do determine
our lives.63

The question is, could there be a motivation for a class that exists in
deprivation – and is now even deprived of a corporate cultural identity – to
change a situation which is dehumanizing and dangerous, but not humiliating to
the point of moral provocation?

We don’t know.

What is certain is that the last flowers have fallen off the chains. The working-
class culture which inspired so much heroism and self-abnegation is dead. That
culture was modernist in the sense of taking aim at hierarchy and trying to
achieve a secular, egalitarian and rights-based society. This the working class
mistook for socialism. It is not. It is capitalism. Capitalism could be itself only if
and when aided by socialist delusion.64 We are now free of this delusion. We
see the task more clearly.

NOTES

This is an edited and abridged version of a longer manuscript.

1  The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin, 1963.

2  A first-rate specimen of the decaying art of polemic, worthy of its target, is

Perry Anderson’s Arguments Within English Marxism, London: NLB/Verso,
1980. He says in an important passage: ‘Today, too, Thompson is entirely
 justified in summoning historical materialism again to take full and self-
critical measure of [William] Morris’s greatness. However, his ulterior
theorization of the reasons why Marxism as a whole long failed to take up
the legacy of Morris cannot be so easily accepted. The former, he maintains,
pertains – or at least pretends – to “knowledge”, the latter to “desire”. These
are “two different operative principles of culture” which may not be
assimilated to each other. Spelling out the distinction, he writes: “The
motions of desire may be legible in the text of necessity, and may then
become subject to rational explanation and criticism. But such criticism can
scarcely touch these motions at their source.” What is wrong with this
account? Essentially that it substitutes an ontological for
a historical explanation of the record of relations between Morris and
Marxism’. (p. 160). Bingo. Rousseauian socialism can be (and is) empiricist,
utopian and moralistic (and, occasionally, passéiste) but never, ever
historicist (in the sense of Historismus, not the Popperian nonsense; cf.
Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, I-II, Berlin: R.
Oldenbourg, 1936; see also Meinecke’s Machiavellism [a translation of
his Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, 1925], ed. by Werner
Stark, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998, esp. the chapter on Ranke, pp.
377-391).

3  E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, London: Merlin, 1978.

4  Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1984. The book also contains instructive
political analyses. The term ‘Western Marxism’ originated with Karl Korsch
(q. v.), was made popular first by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his
epochal Adventures of the Dialectic [1955], Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1986, pp. 30-58, and reinvented by Anderson himself in his
famous Considerations on Western Marxism, London: NLB, 1976, where he
notes rather presciently the shift of Marxist theory away from economics and
politics to culture and art, another telling sign of decline for a revolutionary
doctrine: see pp. 49-74.

5  To quote the perhaps most famous words in the modern history of ideas: ‘All
fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’. Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1847], ed. by Gareth Stedman
Jones, London: Penguin, 2002, pp. 222-3.
6  In an essay written but never published in English, and available only in
Hungarian translation: ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ [1953], in K.
Polányi, Fasizmus, demokrácia, ipari társadalom, Budapest: Gondolat, 1986,
pp. 244-258.

7  Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation [1944], Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

8  The Gift, London: Routledge, 1970. Cf. the chapters ‘Don, contrat, échange’
and ‘Sources, matériaux, textes à l’appui de “l’Essai sur le don”’, in Marcel
Mauss, Oeuvres 3, présentation de Victor Karady, Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 1969, pp. 29-103. Paul Veyne has also demonstrated how in the
ancient Greek city-states, this kind of display became a
system, euergetismos, the system of ‘good works’ whereby the richest
aristocrats had been forced by the community to sacrifice large chunks of
their wealth for public purposes (military, naval, religious and athletic) in
exchange for honours, but under pain of confiscation and exile, in lieu of
taxation. Honour was equated with giving up, not amassing,
wealth. Civisme meant sacrifice. See his Bread and Circuses, London:
Penguin Books, 1990, an abridged version of Le Pain et le cirque, Paris: Les
Éditions du Seuil, 1976.

9  See his The Accursed Share, New York: Zone Books, 1991. Cf. Georges
Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed. by
Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 116-
129; for background see his ‘The Moral Meaning of Sociology’, in
Bataille, The Absence of Myth, ed. by Michael Richardson, London: Verso,
1994, pp. 103-112. On war as play, he spoke in a radio interview (on
Nietzsche) with Georges Charbonnier on 14 January 1959, see Bataille, Une
liberté souveraine, ed. by Michel Surya, Paris: Farrago, 2000, p. 130.

10  Emile, or On Education, ed. by Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1979,
pp. 224, 225.

11  E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral
Law, New York: The New Press, 1993, pp. 109-110. Rousseauian socialism
was often attracted to counter-cultural intermundia, far away from official
‘polite’ culture. Bataille, the alleged ‘crazed pornographer’ is a case in point,
see his texts from the 1930s anti-Stalinist left subculture, L’Apprenti sorcier,
ed. by Marina Galletti, Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1999; cf. Laure: Une
rupture, ed. by Anne Roche and Jérôme Peignot, Paris: Éditions des Cendres,
1999 (letters of Laure, Bataille, Boris Souvarine, Pierre Pascal, Simone
Weil). The subversive potential of demotic or popular culture was shown to
great effect by Robert Darnton; see his The Great Cat Massacre, New York:
Vintage, 1985, and particularly The Literary Underground of the Old
 Regime, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. It is small wonder that
it was he who pointed out the parallels between the clandestine literature of
pre-revolutionary France and the underground samizdat literature in Eastern
Europe (of which this writer was a modest practitioner), see R.
Darnton, Berlin Journal 1989-1990, New York: W.W. Norton, 1991 It is
pretty characteristic that defeated Marxian socialists would retreat to the
‘antinomian’ stance and discover the ‘authentic’ proletarian culture, like
Jacques Rancière in his The Nights of Labor, Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1989. It is significant that Rancière was Louis Althusser’s
comrade-in-arms and ends up as an ally of E.P. Thompson.

12  This does not mean, of course, that Rousseauian socialists are averse to faux-
naïf appeals to reason. See, for instance, P.-J. Proudhon, Les Confessions
d’un révolutionnaire, 1849, ed. by Daniel Halévy and Hervé Trinquier, Paris:
Éditions Tops, 1997, p. 141.

13  At the same time, Rousseau would extol the merits of a music rooted in a
parochial community, necessarily based on the cadences of an ethnic
language. As in Rousseau, ‘Lettre à d’Alembert’ [1758], in Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, V, Pléiade edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1995, p.
15.

14  ‘… the Savage lives in himself; sociable man, always outside himself, is
capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the
sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment’. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. by Victor Gourevitch, New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1990, pp. 198-9.

15  For a neo-Weberian analysis of puritan elements in Rousseau’s views on

inwardness and moral economy, see Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and
Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 111-151.

16  Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime, New York: Oantheon,
1981.

17  See the classical statement about the oligarchical tendency in (mainly
socialist) political organizations: Robert Michels, Political Parties [1915],
London: Macmillan, 1968, cf. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy
1905-1917, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972, esp. pp. 88-145.

18  See G.M. Tamás, ‘Un capitalisme pur et simple’, La Nouvelle Alternative,
60-61, March-June 2004, pp. 13-40.
19  ‘Meta’-capitalist transcendence had to stay utopian in order to be able to fall
back on moral rather than historical criticism. This amounted to a transition
from Hegel to Kant, which, as Lukács well demonstrated, is a certain sign of
defeat. The philosophical manifesto of the 1918 German revolution shows
this clearly in its theologizing metaphysical rhapsody: see Ernst Bloch, The
Spirit of Utopia, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, pp. 237-8.

20  See Thompson’s famous essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist

Register 1965, written against Anderson’s ‘Origins of the Present
Crisis’, New Left Review, I/23, January/February 1964, and Tom Nairn’s
‘The English Working Class’, New Left Review, I/24, March/April 1964.

21  See the series of superb and gloomy reports in Perry Anderson, English
Questions, London: Verso, 1992, pp. 48-104, 121-192, 193-301.
This réquisitoire of English decadence and philistinism has many parallels in
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy [1869], ed. by Samuel Lipman, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

22  This, perhaps necessary, tactic of the socialist movements was criticized
very early on. See the important essay of the greatest Hungarian Marxist
before Lukács, Ervin Szabó (an anarcho-syndicalist), ‘Politique et
syndicats’, Le Mouvement Socialiste, 1909, t. 1, pp. 57-67; cf. Ervin
Szabó, Socialism and Social Science, ed. by J.M. Bak and G. Litván,
London: Routledge, 1982. The clearest statement of the problem as regards
Bolshevism is to be found in Herman Gorter, Open Letter to Comrade
Lenin [1920], London: Wildcat, n.d. [1989], cf. Herman Gorter, ‘Die
Ursachen des Nationalismus im Proletariat’ [1915] and ‘Offener Brief an den
Genossen Lenin’ [1920], in A. Pannekoek and H. Gorter, Organisation und
Taktik der proletarischen Revolution, ed. by Hans Manfred Bock,
Frankfurt/Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1969, pp. 73-87, 168-227.

23  Ervin Szabó attributes the 1848 revolution in Hungary to a class conflict
between landed gentry and landed aristocracy; see his ‘Aus den Parteien und
Klassenkämpfen in der ungarischen Revolution von 1848’, Archiv für die
Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1919, pp. 258-307
(fragment from a larger work in Hungarian, this latter considered a classic).

24  See Perry Anderson, ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ in English

Questions, pp. 105-118. The whole concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ seems
to disintegrate as a result of late twentieth-century Marxist research.

25  She was even able to appropriate the dividends of the most blatantly
conservative work of historiography which, during the Thatcher decade,
declared the bankruptcy of the plebeian school in history initiated by the
 CPGB Historians’ Group in the 1950s: see J.C.D. Clark, English Society
1688-1832, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Clark proves
himself to be the scourge especially of E.P. Thompson, in ‘a tract for the
times’ quite enjoyable in its acidity and its fashionably anti-snobbish return
to those supremely unfashionable writers, Sir Lewis Namier and Sir Herbert
Butterfield; see esp. pp. 141-161, 258-276.

26  Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, London: Verso,

1991, pp. 91-2.

27  Ibid.

28  ‘A Culture in Contraflow’, in Anderson, English Questions, p. 300. See also

his essays in A Zone of Engagement, London: Verso, 1992.

29  This is a problematic best illuminated in a few wonderful books by T.J.

Clark such as Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848
Revolution [1973], London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. See his
masterpiece, Farewell to an Idea: Fragments from a History of Modernism,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, the best summation in existence of
the intricate and profound identity of modernism and political radicalism (my
favourites are the chapters on Pissarro and on ‘Freud’s Cézanne’, pp. 55-
167); summations though, disturbingly, are of the past, are they not?

30  There is a book, sadly overlooked, in spite of its many merits, which
analyses the political aspect of Marx’s picture of England: David MacGre-
gor, Hegel, Marx, and the English State, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1996, especially strong on contracts and the Factory Acts; cf. David
MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx, Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1990.

31  The only exceptions are the failed revolts of Left Communists, Council
Communists, anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. It is only they who ever
tried to elaborate a Marxian political project. See [Philippe Bourrinet], The
Dutch and German Communist Left, London: ICC, 2001 and the numerous
and voluminous works of Hans Manfred Bock. There is a recent re-edition of
Anton Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils [1948], ed. by Robert Barsky,
Oakland: AK Press, 2003.

32  ‘A compressed statement of [Thompson’s] argument: Production relations

do not mechanically determine class consciousness (p), therefore: Class may
not be defined purely in terms of production relations (q). P is true,
but q does not follow from it. We are at liberty to define class, with more or
less … precision, by reference to production relations, without inferring, as
 Thompson says we are the bound to do, that the culture and consciousness of
a class may be readily deduced from its objective position within production
relations. The opponent Thompson envisages commits the same fallacy as
his critic. He too supposes that if p is true, then q is true. That is why he
bases a denial of p on a denial of q, and erects a mechanical Marxism which
ignores the open drama of historical process. The difficulty is not the
opponent’s premiss, whose innocence Thompson fails to disprove, but the
hasty reasoning with which he follows it. Thompson’s motive is to insist
on p, with which we have no quarrel. But he mistakenly supposes that one
who accepts a structural definition of class, and so rejects q, is thereby
committed against p. There is no good reason to think that’. G.A.
Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence [1978], expanded edition,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 74-5. The antiquated, ‘period’
feel of Cohen’s analytical style, quite extraneous to the book’s main
argument, not to speak of its historical and philosophical sensibility, does not
detract from its value, notwithstanding its untenable theory of ‘theory’ and
such. Moreover, what G.A. Cohen has to add on class is even more
important: ‘“The separation of the free worker from his means of
production” – the phrase encapsulates the structured characterization of the
proletarian …: his “freedom” is his ownership of his labour power, his
“separation” is his non-ownership of his means of production. The text thus
recommends individuation of social forms (and thereby “economic epochs of
the structure of society”) in production relational terms … [T]he production
relation binding immediate producers will be broadly invariant across a
single social formation: there will be no unordered mélange of slaves, serfs,
and proletarians … [We] say that there are as many types of economic
structure as there are kinds of relation of immediate producers to productive
forces. From the Marxian viewpoint, social forms are distinguished and
unified by their types of economic structure, as individuated by the
production relations dominant within them’ (pp. 78-9). It is an open question
though, whether this is valid also for non-capitalist societies, where the
separation of the economy from the rest of society and la chose
commune has not happened.

33  See my ‘On Post-Fascism’, Boston Review, Summer 2000, pp. 42-6,

reprinted in A. Sajó, ed., Out and Into Authoritarian Law, Amsterdam:
Kluwer International Law, 2002, pp. 203-219. Cf. G.M. Tamás, ‘Restoration
Romanticism’, Public Affairs Quarterly, 7/4, October 1993, pp. 379-401.

34  Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus [1966], complete revised English edition,

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 66.
35  Cf. Georges Dumézil, La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés, Paris: Galli-
mard, 1983, pp. 17-36.

36  A splendid book on this theme: Georges Dumézil, Heur et malheur du

guerrier, Paris: Flammarion, 1992, influenced, alas, by the waffle on ‘der
arische Männerbund’ and ‘die kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen’ (Stig
Wikander, 1938 and Otto Höfler, 1935, respectively), but no matter: I
recommend the superb chapters on the Tarquinii, Indra the sinner, and the
comparison of the Horatii and the �ptya.

37  Karl Marx, Grundrisse [1857-1858], London: Penguin, 1993, p. 364.

38  Luke 6, 20-2, 24-8.

39  I tried to demonstrate, long ago, that this is an illusion: G.M. Tamás, L’Oeil
et la main, Geneva: Éditions Noir, 1985 (original
Hungarian samizdat edition: 1983).

40  A compendium of anti-egalitarian prejudices, very much a predecessor of

neo-conservative views of our own day, but funnier, is Max
Nordau’s Degeneration [a translation of Entartung, 1892], with an
introduction by George L. Mosse, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1993, with amusing rants against Ibsen, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Wagner,
Nietzsche, Huysmans and others. It was enormously popular when it
appeared precisely because it pointed to the impotence of egalitarianism,
especially of Christian and Jacobin origin, against bourgeois society.

41  It is quite astonishing to see the power of the old landed interest until the
Second World War in the westernmost state of Europe; see David
Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1990, with highly instructive appendices. The data
first collected by W.D. Rubinstein are inventively and entertainingly
interpreted. The book bolsters some of the Anderson-Nairn claims, albeit
belatedly. The peasant question was raised by Karl Kautsky; the debate raged
in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia; there was also an interesting
contribution from Rumania, by Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea on ‘the new
serfdom’; later, the criticism of Lenin, Trotsky and the October
Revolution from the Left was frequently based on the need of the ‘socialist
revolution’ to distribute land to the peasants, creating thereby petty
entrepreneurial capitalism in agriculture, that had to be ‘liquidated’
subsequently by the centralizing re-distributive state in a violent self-
repression of the revolution or, according to the Stalinists, the liquidation of
phase I of revolution by phase II (‘collectivization’ through massacre and
famine).
42  Cf. Perry Anderson, ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’. The historical
points are discussed in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s illuminating book, The Origin
of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso, 2002, esp. pp. 95-146. Apart
from its striking originality, it contains an excellent survey of recent
controversies, around Perry Anderson’s Passage from Antiquity to
Feudalism [1974], London: Verso, 1992 and Lineage of the Absolutist
State [1974], London: Verso, 1979, and the Brenner Debate (see The
Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe [1976], ed. by T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). There is a sharp attack on
Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner by Ricardo Duchesne in ‘On the
Origins of Capitalism’, Rethinking Marxism, 14(3), Fall 2002, pp. 129-137,
which for lack of specialist expertise I cannot appraise, but as an outsider, I
am not wholly convinced. Central and East (including Russian) experience
seems to me to bear out Meiksins Wood’s contentions, as far as I can judge.

43  This is what Andrew Levine fails to see in his interesting book, A Future for
Marxism? Althusser, the Analytical Turn and the Revival of Socialist
Theory, London: Pluto, 2003. It is quite ironical that the two authors who in
the nineteen-seventies tried to recreate a pristine left theory, Louis Althusser
and G.A. Cohen, should be Mr Levine’s heroes in a book which accepts
egalitarianism (in John Roemer and others) and ‘normative’ political
philosophy (in the later G.A. Cohen) as an egress for wayward Marxism
without any further ado. Andrew Levine’s contention that G.A. Cohen and
others have brought Marxism into the ‘mainstream’ is rather extraordinary.
Imagine a system of beliefs that has influenced the lives of hundreds of
millions of people on four continents, taught around nocturnal camp-fires in
dozens of civil wars and hundreds of trade union institutions, debated by
dozens of revolutionary or reforming governments, brought into the
‘mainstream’ of a tiny and transient chapter in the history of thought,
analytically styled political philosophy. Academic myopia often beggars
belief. Whatever analytical remains from analytical Marxism is rather the
‘period piece’ feel, a combination of Oxford flippancy and Cambridge
philistinism, besides a commendable striving for clarity. Being ‘no-
nonsense’ and ‘tough-minded’ and ‘anti-bullshit’ is more a question of style
than anything else. Just as nobody takes seriously Spinoza’s Euclidean
pretensions or Hobbes’s aspirations to be ‘scientific’, and just as this does not
prevent us from appreciating their work, the ‘analytical’ style of a certain
Marxian writing, however secondary, does not preclude its insights from
being illuminating or useful. But it is strange, passing strange that an
eccentric manner should be considered ‘mainstream’ while the grand
tradition of post-Renaissance European social philosophy – of which
Marxism is, of course, a part – should be seen as marginal. Andrew Levine
 also speaks about the ‘insularity’ of French academic philosophy, which
reminds one of the famous English headline, ‘Fog over Channel, Continent
cut off’. Marxists used to be internationalist revolutionaries, didn’t they?

44  ‘Notes on Adolph Wagner’ [1879-80], in Marx, Later Political Writings, ed.

by Terrell Carver, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 232.

45  In the draft programme of German social democracy you could find the
sentence: ‘Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture’. To which, Marx
responds: ‘Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the
source of use-values (and what else is material wealth?) as labour, which is
itself only the expression of a natural power, human labour power. This line
can be found in any children’s primer and is correct in so far as
the implication is that labour requires certain means and materials. However
a socialist programme cannot allow a bourgeois phrase like this to conceal
the very circumstances that give it some sense’. ‘Critique of the Gotha
Programme’, in Marx, Later Political Writings, pp. 208-9.

46  ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in Lukács, History

and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923], Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2000, p. 150.

47  ‘The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of “ghostly

objectivity” cannot… content itself with the reduction of all objects for the
gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the
whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an
organic part of his personality, they are things which he can “own” or
“dispose of” like the various objects of the external world. And there is no
natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can
bring his physical and psychic “qualities” into play without their being
subjected increasingly to this reifying process …. This rationalization of the
world appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate the very depths of man’s
physical and psychic nature. It is limited, however, by its own formalism ….
On closer examination the structure of a crisis is seen to be no more than a
heightening of the degree and intensity of the daily life of bourgeois society.
In its unthinking, mundane reality that life seems firmly held together by
“natural laws”; yet it can experience a sudden dislocation because the bonds
uniting its various elements and partial systems are a chance affair even at
their most normal. So that the pretence that society is regulated by “eternal,
iron” laws which branch off into the different special laws applying to
particular areas is finally revealed for what it is: a pretence. The true
structure of society appears rather in the independent, rationalized and formal
partial laws whose links with each other are of necessity purely formal (i.e.
their formal interdependence can be formally systematized), while as far as
 concrete realities are concerned they can only establish fortuitous
connections’ (Ibid., p. 101). It appears that contingency is the outcome of
extreme rationalization (described by Max Weber) of society’s technological,
administrative, legal, logistical, military, etc. sub-systems in a framework of
outlandish randomness. No truly rational control is conceivable over such a
collection of disparate ‘facts’.

48  I spoke about this problem à propos Fichte (the Rousseauian and Kantian
revolutionary genius) in ‘Fichte’s “Die Bestimmung des Gelehrten”: A
Sketch’, Collegium Budapest Workshop Series 12, Budapest: Institute of
Advanced Study, 1997, passim, and in ‘From Subjectivity to Privacy and
Back Again’, Social Research, 69(1), Spring 2002, pp. 201-221.

49  The Retreat from Class [1986], London: Verso, 1998.

50  ‘In order to place ourselves firmly within the field of articulation, we must
begin by renouncing the conception of “society” as founding totality of its
partial processes. We must, therefore, consider the openness of the social as
the constitutive ground or “negative essence” of the existing, and the diverse
“social orders” as precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate
the field of differences’. So write Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau in
their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy [1985], London: Verso, 2001, pp. 95-
6. Wood’s response is rather cruel: ‘After much theoretical huffing and
puffing, has not the mountain laboured and brought forth – pluralism? The
alternative – which always lurks menacingly in the background – is a
doctrine according to which some external agency, somehow uniquely and
autonomously capable of generating a hegemonic discourse out of its own
inner resources, will impose it from above, giving the indeterminate mass a
collective identity and creating a “people” or “nation” where none existed
before. The sinister possibilities inherent in such a view are obvious’. The
Retreat from Class, p. 63. (Two remarks here: I think more highly of
Mouffe’s and Laclau’s talents than Meiksins Wood does; and I think the
‘sinister possibilities’ are already quite obvious in Gramsci’s
Machiavellianism. The end result, though, is indeed pluralism and
egalitarianism of ‘recognition’ of the contemporary NGO variety.)

51  An extremely interesting anthology of texts from the Socialist Register,

centred around a few seminal articles by Ralph Miliband, discusses the case
of Britain while considering the general problem of whether the construction
of a cross-class alliance led by labour could ever achieve socialism: David
Coates, ed., Paving the Third Way: The Critique of Parliamentary Socialism,
London: Merlin, 2003, with contributions by Ralph Miliband, John Saville,
Leo Panitch, Colin Leys, Hilary Wainwright and David Coates.
52  See Ernest Mandel’s prescient From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, London:
NLB, 1978. The PCI’s overall political role was not all that different from
that of Labour or the SPD or SPÖ.

53  See G.M. Tamás, ‘Un capitalisme pur et simple’. There is an earlier, non-
socialist essay by the same author, with some realization of this problem, cf.
G.M. Tamás, ‘Socialism, Capitalism and Modernity’, in Larry Diamond and
Marc F. Plattner, eds., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Revisited,
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 54-68; see also
my ‘Victory Defeated’, in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner,
eds., Democracy After Communism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002, pp. 126-131.

54  David Wootton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of

Political Writing in Stuart England, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, pp.
285-316. Gerrard Winstanley said, ‘This is your inward principle, O ye
present powers of England. You do not study how to advance universal love.
If you did, it would appear in action’. (Ibid., p. 321). This is the authentic
voice of revolution.

55  Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of

Marx’s Critical Theory [1993], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003, p. 160.

56  The philosophical doctrine of a reconstructed people – reconstructed through

the abolition of commerce and the market proper – is Fichte’s in Der
geschloßne Handelsstaat [1800], ed. by Fritz Medicus and Hans Hirsch,
Philosophische Bibliothek #316, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1979, esp.
pp. 89-126; cf. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts [1796],
ed. by Manfred Zahn, Phil. Bibl. #256, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1991, pp.
156-184; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Staatslehre, oder über das Verhältniss
des Urstaates zum Vernunftreiche… [1813, posthumous], in I.H. Fichte,
ed., Fichtes Werke IV, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1971, pp. 497 ad
fin.

57  Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, pp. 62-3.

58  See Thompson’s famous preface to The Making (p. 11): ‘…class is a rela-
tionship, and not a thing…’.

59  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2002. It is quite instructive to compare the grand portraitists of the late
bourgeoisie, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Roger
Martin du Gard, Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, Alberto Moravia, Tibor Déry –
 with Walter Benjamin. The last generations of the old bourgeoisie are
distinguished by a certain weakness and tenderness towards small things; it is
the first non-labouring class that has no discernible social or political
function. Politics is still made by the grands seigneurs or the new
professionals (lawyers and apparatchiki), glory, elegance and courtliness are
still preserves of the nobility together with sports, duels, military prowess
and sexual licence. Arts are the only terrain where neither professionalism
nor ‘caste’ plays an important role. Inwardness (Innerlichkeit), plush
comfort, solitude, consumption of culture (from newspapers to operas) are
the world of the flâneur which he escapes by flâner. It is only Mann and Déry
among those listed above who could be said to have been conscious of an
apocalyptic dimension to all this (think of the function of toothache in The
Buddenbrooks). These authors all believed that it should be proletarian
socialism, however barbaric it may turn out to be, which takes the place of
the ailing, self-indulgent, morbidly eroticized microcosm of cultivated
bourgeoisie with its Mahler and Debussy and Klimt and Schiele. They never
thought of corporate management, tabloid television and pop music.

60  About this the best Marxian (or any kind of) analysis is by Robert Kurz in
his largely untranslated books and his periodicals (Krisis, its lighter Austrian
counterpart, Streifzüge, and now Exit). He is the thinker closest to Moishe
Postone I know of. I believe he is the most original thinker on the German,
and perhaps European, Left nowadays. He deserves to be more generally
known.

61  The intellectual history of the highly interesting and important discussions
(chiefly among Marxists) on class as a problem of political philosophy is
summarized (and an original solution thereof is attempted) on a very high
theoretical level by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge
and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987. It is a thousand pities that I cannot argue
with it here.

62  A starting point in envisaging the future function of the class-in-itself would
surely be the imposing work of Erik Olin Wright, the greatest authority on
class today. There are continuing sociological investigations about this: see
the innovative work of Stanley Aronowitz and Michael Zweig. None of the
above makes their kind of valuable work superfluous, quite the contrary.

63  On the debate concerning the new imperialism, see G.M. Tamás, ‘Isten
hozta, Mr. Bush’, Élet és Irodalom (Supplement), 22 April 2005.
64  ‘Revolutionary theory is now the sworn enemy of revolutionary ideology
– and it knows it’. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967], §124,
New York: Zone Books, 1995, p. 90.